Privacy Notice

Who controls your data

[OPERATOR LEGAL ENTITY] of [REGISTERED ADDRESS] is the controller of the personal data described here. For any privacy question or request, write to privacy@scienced.org.

What we collect

Scienced is a public professional network. Most of what you create is intended to be public, and this notice is explicit about which parts are not.

• Account. Your name, email address, and — if you set one — a profile image. Your email address is never shown on a public page and is deliberately excluded from every public API payload.
• Profile. Username, biography, title, institution, department, location, website, and an optional verified ORCID iD. All of this is public.
• Content. Posts, comments, uploaded images, likes, cites, group memberships, and reading lists. Public, except your saved posts and the private note you can attach to a save, which only you can see.
• Sessions. Your IP address and user agent, stored against each active session so you can recognise and revoke it.
• Institutional verification. If you verify an academic email address, we store that address, its domain, the institution name, and a hash of the one-time code. The address itself is never shown publicly — only the verified institution.
• Course enrolment. If you enrol in a course, we record which course and when. Enrolment also admits you to that course’s private community. There is no payment processing on Scienced today, and enrolment records nothing about payment.
• Moderation. If you report content, we store the report, its reason, and any detail you add. If content is removed, we keep a record of what was removed as an audit trail.
• Blocking. If you block someone, we store that you did. The person you blocked is never told.

Why we can use it

We process your account and content to provide the service you asked for — that is, to perform our contract with you. We process session metadata, rate-limit records, and moderation records on the basis of our legitimate interest in keeping the service available and safe. Optional email — the weekly digest — is sent only with your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.

Who else processes it

Scienced runs on infrastructure and services operated by others. This is the complete list; it is checked against the code by an automated test.

Cloudflare

Hosting, edge network, rate limiting, and media object storage (R2). Requests, IP addresses, and uploaded images. Global edge network.

Turso

Managed libSQL database. All account, profile, and content records described below. Operator-selected region.

Google

Optional sign-in provider. Your name, email address, and profile image, only if you choose Google sign-in. Global.

ORCID

Optional researcher identity linking and publication import. Your ORCID iD and public works, only if you connect it. Global.

Resend

Transactional email delivery. Your email address and the message contents. Global.

OpenAI

Batch evaluation of public arXiv papers for the Papers rankings. Public paper metadata only. No account or personal data is sent. Global.

arXiv

Source of the public paper metadata that Papers ranks. None. Scienced reads from arXiv; it sends nothing to it. Global.

How long we keep it

Your account and its content are kept until you delete them. Deleting your account removes your profile, posts, comments, likes, follows, notifications, and blocks, and queues your uploaded media for deletion from object storage. Some of that cleanup runs on a retrying background job, so it may complete shortly after the account itself is gone.

Rate-limiting records expire automatically. Moderation records outlive the content they describe, because a takedown that erased its own audit trail would be unreviewable; they are deleted with the reporting account.

Your choices

• Access and export. Write to privacy@scienced.org and we will provide a copy of your data.
• Correction. Edit your profile and content directly, at any time.
• Deletion. Delete your account from Settings.
• Email. The weekly digest is off by default. Turn it off again from Settings or from the unsubscribe link in any digest.

Changes

If this notice changes materially, we will say so on this page and update the effective date above.